Fatafati Friday. Viernes Negro. Black Friday

Two books on how the world bought into America's big shopping deal

Nov 27, 2024

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The Big Story:

Black Friday (Nov 29) is upon us and it’s global, with some estimates counting roughly 130 countries engaged in the world’s biggest secular festival: the act of shopping.

In Bangladesh, it’s Fatafati (or awesome) Friday1 and in Costa Rica, Viernes Negro.2 But almost everywhere else – from Austria3 to India,4 Slovenia5 to South Africa6 – Black Friday is exactly that.

It’s an orgy of buying and selling. This year, US retail sales could be a record-breaking $75bn over the weekend starting Black Friday.7 The UK is set to spend £7.1bn.8

This Week, Those Books:

The book that shows Black Friday’s link to the increasing commercialisation of Christmas.
Greed is good, kinda, screamed this cult novel, which became a film.

The Backstory:

Black Friday started in the US in the 1960s and became a success despite retailers’ efforts to rebrand the shopping bonanza Big Friday.
It’s linked to feverish pre-Christmas shopping after Americans have gobbled down the turkey and trimmings on Thanksgiving, which is always the fourth Thursday of November.
As Stephen Nissenbaum, a well-known social historian has written: “In our own day the Christmas season begins as early as the day after Thanksgiving for many people, and continues to January 1. But our culture is by no means the first in which ‘Christmas’ has meant an entire season rather than a single day”.9
When Black Friday became a marker of America’s so-called “Christmas creep”, ie crass commercialisation many weeks ahead of Dec 25, large swaths of the world adopted it as an excuse for binge shopping and big discount sales.
But in some countries, Black Friday can mean something quite different. In Myanmar, it refers to a massacre that occurred on May 30, 2003.10

This Week’s Books:

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: The Commercialization of Christmas

By: Karl Ammons

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Year: 2015

This book, of which I’ve only been able to find an online sample, stands alone. It’s the one read that actually speaks to what is indisputable about Black Friday: It is an attempt to get you Christmas shopping in November and thereby ring up sales and profits several weeks ahead of the big holiday season.

The sample I read provides some interesting detail on the hype over Black Friday. The author points out that the news media has long described it as “the busiest shopping day of the year” but adds that this was not always true, especially from 1993 to 2001, when the last Saturday before Christmas usually took first place.

He says that the earliest known usage of Black Friday as a post-Thanksgiving shopping day appears in the Dec 1, 1961 issue of an American paper, The Shortsville-Manchester Enterprise. However, the term was slow to penetrate the cultural consciousness, with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting as late as 1985 that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were unaware of Black Friday.

He notes that in 19^th century America, the term Black Friday was associated with the financial crisis of 1869.

More in tune with today, he also points to the spreading Black Friday shopping craze, from Canada, through to Mexico, India, Panama and further afield.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

By: Sophie Kinsella

Publisher: The Dial Press (Penguin Random House)

Year: 2001

Chick lit, yes. A kind of Bridget Jones Diary for shopaholics (and financial journalists), yes. A fun read, yes.

The heroine, Rebecca (Becky) Bloomwood, is gormless but knowing. She knows financial bullshit. Heck, she indulges in it herself.

And yet, here’s the twist in the tale. Becky is a financial journalist, paid, as she says, “to tell other people how to organize their money”. But she doesn’t live that life, nor believe in it. She knows the value of things – high-fashion designer clothes, for example – but doesn’t acknowledge the limits of her means.

Routinely maxing out her credit card on frivolous buys, she gets to a bad place, things come to a head and Becky, providentially, ends up just fine. Until we get there though, she might be the one for whom Black Friday was designed.

Choice quotes:
“I honestly feel as though I’ve run an obstacle course to get here. In fact, I think, they should list shopping as a cardiovascular activity. My heart never beats as fast as it does when I see a ‘reduced by 50 percent’ sign”.
“That moment. That instant when your fingers curl round the handles of a shiny, uncreased bag—and all the gorgeous new things inside it become yours. What’s it like? It’s like going hungry for days, then cramming your mouth full of warm buttered toast. It’s like waking up and realizing it’s the weekend. It’s like the better moments of sex. Everything else is blocked out of your mind. It’s pure, selfish pleasure”.
“…almost reverentially, I lift up the scarf. It’s beautiful. It’s even more beautiful here than it was in the shop. I drape it around my neck and grin stupidly at Suze. ‘Oh, Bex’, she murmurs. ‘It’s gorgeous!’ For a moment we are both silent. It’s as though we’re communing with a higher being. The god of shopping”.

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